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Canadian Wonder Tales is a collection of classic Canadian folklore stories by Cyrus MacMillan. The tales in this collection have been gathered in various parts of Canada. They have been selected from a larger collection of folk-tales and folk-songs made by the writer for more academic and scientific purposes. They are not the product of the writer’s imagination; they are the common possession of the folk. Many of them are still reverently believed by the Canadian Indians, and all are still told with seriousness around camp fires in forests and on plains, upon the sea and by cottage hearths.
This is the book of a soldier-student. Captain Macmillan interrupted his teaching work in Montreal to go overseas with one of our McGill Batteries, and from Somewhere in France he has asked me to stand sponsor for his volume.
The author’s method resembles that followed by the brothers Grimm a century ago. He has taken down from the lips of living people, pretty much as they were given to him, a series of stories which obviously contain many elements that have been handed down by oral tradition from some far-off past. They are mostly animal stories, with all the usual features of magic and transformation, articulate speech on the part of the animals, and interchange of more or less kindly offices between man and beast.
The result is a collection of fables which–especially as illustrated by an eminent artist–will prove a very acceptable Christmas book for children, and will give their elders also some food for reflection. Not that there is, so far as I have been able to discover, any moral about some at least of the tales. They are not stories with a purpose. But they suggest to the adult reader the essential identity of many of the methods by which in a more or less remote antiquity the human race expressed itself in various parts of the world.
